Judith Thompson is Professor of English at Dalhousie University and is, in her own words a ‘Romanticist by profession and predilection’.  Over the course of her career she has written on a wide range of topics including Wordsworth, Coleridge, poetics, literary couplings, cultural geographies, archival work, genre and historicism, but, as most readers of this blog will know, the lodestar of her research is the orator, writer and elocutionist John Thelwall, on whom she has published a series of groundbreaking studies, articles and editions.  In the interview below, we discuss her work on Thelwall: past, present and forthcoming.

1) How did you first become interested in John Thelwall and his works?

I first heard of Thelwall as a grad student, while reading Kenneth Johnston for my PhD dissertation on Wordsworth and wandering.  I read The Peripatetic, found it fascinating, and decided to propose an edition for my first new project after getting the degree.  The text was remarkably hard to access (misindexed in the microfilm collection I consulted), which introduced me to another intriguing but frustrating feature of Thelwall’s oeuvre; I was amazed by how much of the archive was missing, whether due to political suppression or sheer bad luck.  But that too was part of what makes his story so compelling: how could such a working-class hero, prolific writer, original thinker and energetic polymath be so thoroughly forgotten?  As I got deeper into my research, more stimulating prospects kept opening up (including the Wordsworth Circle connection).  I also adopted the peripatetic method that I have used ever since, following in his footsteps and venturing out from the major libraries into little local studies collections in places where he lectured, like Huddersfield.  In so doing, I began to realize that Thelwall was like a thread connecting disparate communities of discourse (metropolitan and provincial, romantic and radical, artisan and professional, oral and written) within and between his own time and place, and our own.  The big pay-off of that method came in 2004, when in the space of two weeks I found both the site of Thelwall’s “Llyswen Farm” in Wales, with its hidden waterfall and hermitage still visible, and the archival treasure-trove of the heretofore unnoticed 1000-page “Derby Manuscript.”  By that time I was completely hooked, and I’ve become increasingly, almost uncannily, obsessed, as if I’m living out A.S. Byatt’s Possession (though sadly, the older I get, the more I’m like Beatrice Nest rather than Maud Bailey).

2) In John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner, you examine Thelwall’s practices as they ‘emerge in reciprocal relationship with those of Wordsworth and Coleridge’.  What do you think were Thelwall’s most important contributions to this occluded collaboration, and why do you think Wordsworth and Coleridge were so keen to write him out of the picture?

Thelwall’s contributions were both formal and philosophical, valuable both in their own right and for the new perspectives they offer on Coleridge and Wordsworth.  Probably his most important contribution is to the development of the ode (including the sonnet, which he defined as an ode of a single stanza), a genre with whose prosodic and conversational possibilities he was experimenting well before he met Coleridge, but which was enriched through their conversational exchange, both intimate and antagonistic, between 1796 and the late 1820s.  His work offers valuable new contexts for rereading both the structure and the substance of the conversation poems, odes and sonnets of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and of romanticism in general.  He articulates a philosophy of correspondence (sympathetic exchange or “action and reaction”) that rivals and reshapes the “one-life philosophy,” and a materialist poetics that challenges but also complements both Coleridgean metaphysics and Wordsworthian naturalism.  Another influential contribution by Thelwall is his technique of seditious allegory, which provides a kind of language theory in practice to counter Coleridgean symbolism, and opens up exciting new ways to read the ballads of Wordsworth in particular.  As to why Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote their friendship with Thelwall out of history: with Coleridge, the motives were obviously political: Thelwall was the embodiment of his own Jacobin past, from which he went out of his way to distance himself, by dissing Thelwall and destroying his letters.  I think there’s a certain psychological contest and contortion involved there too, consistent with his other male friendships.  That same battle of egos is evident with Thelwall and Wordsworth, but for him, I think the repudiation was based more on changing class allegiance than political ideology: as Wordsworth entered a higher social sphere and scorned the mass marketplace, he was embarrassed by Thelwall’s brash vulgarity, autodidact ambition and commercial success.  But Wordsworth’s manner was more genteel: he did not disavow or condemn his old friend, just damned him with faint praise (as he did with others like Charlotte Smith).  In fact, probably the best evidence of Wordsworth’s unique brand of seditious allegory is the retroactive image-management of his Fenwick notes.  Posterity has proven him a better spin-doctor than either Coleridge or Thelwall.

3) You’ve been an instrumental figure in the foundation of the John Thelwall Society, have been involved in pioneering productions of Thelwall’s drama, and have worked closely with other scholars on Thelwall on a number of projects, most recently co-editing The Daughter of Adoption with Michael Scrivener and Yasmin Solomonescu.  How important have these collaborations been for you in seeking to recapture Thelwall’s importance?

Since the beginning of my career, collaboration has been absolutely necessary for my work.  I think this is a result of my grad school experience: I was one of the last generation to apprentice under a system that taught us to do research in intellectual isolation, like the so-called solitary geniuses we studied, and I emerged hungry for Thelwall’s “sweet converse,” even though I had not met him yet.  When I did, my desperation was compounded by the almost complete absence of people who’d even heard of him.  All I ever really wanted was someone to talk to about my reading, to have the kind of casual critical conversation that is normal when researching other, canonical writers.  In the absence of a community of response and a body of known texts, I had to create the taste by which Thelwall was to be appreciated; hence my editorial and archival work, undertaken by default, simply as a way to start the conversation.  Anyone whose cursory query about Thelwall has been met with one of my long impassioned emails has seen how desperately I need to bounce ideas off someone; I apologize for cluttering your inbox but this is the only way I can develop intellectually, and I have a whole file of such messages, many of them like little mini-essays or abstracts.  Two of my earliest (and most reciprocally generous) email correspondents were Michael and Yasmin, so it was natural that we would extend this into more formal collaborations, and I do the same thing with my students.  Of course this complements Thelwall’s own modus operandi (as well as recent trends in Romantic studies, and our networked culture in general), and as Thelwall Studies has expanded, the collaborative, conversational method (between disciplines, between junior and senior scholars, between academic and activist publics) has become integral to the unique democratic mission of the Thelwall Society.

4) What can we expect from your upcoming edition of Thelwall’s Selected Poetry and Poetics?

The book is coming out March 12, and I think that readers will be surprised by both the range and the quality of Thelwall’s poetry, which connects his many interests and identities: his poetic voices and forms are as various as his polymathic vocations.  The roughly 125 poems and essays I’ve selected draw equally from the unpublished Derby MS and his publications, which are more numerous than scholars have realized (five volumes of verse between 1787 and 1822, along with many periodicals, miscellanies and anthologies–and that doesn’t even include the poems he recited at thousands of lectures over more than 25 years).  I’m able to reprint only about a quarter of his total verse output, and there were so many really good pieces I was forced to cut or excerpt radically, but it is still broadly representative.  Loosely following Thelwall’s own instructions, the book is organized by genre and chronology into eight chapters, starting with pastorals, and moving through comic ballads and satires, sonnets, odes of various kinds, excerpts from his epic, and autobiographies.  Each chapter has a headnote introducing the genre, followed by a relevant essay by Thelwall, and there are brief headnotes to each poem or sequence, as well as explanatory footnotes.  Another surprising feature of the edition is the number of love poems Thelwall wrote; he looks ahead to Brecht by combining radical politics and eros in ways that beg to be explored further.  Much of his work is also autobiographical, and in the introductory chapter to the Poems edition I sketch the first complete biography of Thelwall, focusing on “the dawn and progress of a poetic mind.”  I also endeavour to explain his challenging and idiosyncratic elocutionary poetics.  This edition connects with other recent work on voice, sound and performance in romantic poetry, and will, I hope, inspire a reassessment of elocution as, among other things, part of an unacknowledged romantic ancestry for contemporary political spoken-word art.

5) What are you planning to work on once the poetry edition is complete?

I’ve already started my next (and final) big project, which is the first full biography of Thelwall.  I guess I’ve been working on it since I first started working on him, but it’s only recently that I’ve realized that this seems to be my destiny (if that makes Thelwall my Darth Vader, so be it).  It was long thought that the missing Cestre materials posed an insurmountable impediment to any Thelwall biography, but with the discovery of the Derby MS, and letters and other archival materials beginning to come out of the woodwork, I think the time is right—though obviously it is going to take me several more years of peripatetic research and lots of collaborative correspondence.  Hand in hand with the biographical project is a continuing editorial/archival one; with the help of grad students who I’m actively recruiting (here’s a shout-out to all prospective applicants reading this blog: Dalhousie wants you), I want to revive my dormant Thelwall website and begin to produce good digital critical editions of many of his works that remain unpublished, including poems I was not able to include in my forthcoming print volume.  I also have a embryonic plan to develop workshop-excursions and teaching resources, live and virtual, to explore and extend the possibilities of Thelwall’s methods of peripatetic, elocutionary reading and/in public activism.  Of course I will continue to cull and develop shorter articles from among that bulging sheaf of emails—right now I am writing a Thelwall ghost story, exploring the limits of historical biography by focusing on what we can and cannot know about what happened at #57 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the haunted summer of 1816.  I am also exploring intersections of gender and genre in relation to Thelwall’s turn-of-the-century transition from seditious to seductive allegory.  All in all, there’s enough there to take me to retirement and beyond.

Richard De Ritter is a Lecturer in the Long Eighteenth Century at the University of Leeds.  He has a particular interest in women’s writing, having published articles on Maria Edgeworth and domesticity; Elizabeth Hamilton and education; and Jane West, patriotism and sensibility.  He has also written on James Boswell and William Hazlitt and worked extensively on the writings of Priscilla Wakefield.  He co-ordinates (with Jeremy Davies) the Leeds Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature research seminar and last year organised a two-day conference on ‘Home and Nation: Reimagining the Domestic, 1750-1850’.  His first monograph, Imagining Women Readers, 1789-1820: Well-Regulated Minds, which we discuss below, was published earlier this year by Manchester University Press.

1) How did you first become interested in the ways that female readers were imagined in the Romantic period?

Initially I was curious about the way that Romantic authors like Keats, Clare and Hazlitt seemed so dismissive – even fearful – of the prospect of women reading their work.  In that respect, the project was more focused on the anxieties of male authorial identity.  These writers were drawing upon stereotypes familiar from the period’s anti-novel discourse, which depicted women readers as superficial, leisured and unproductive.  But when I turned to the way women readers were addressed and instructed in conduct and educational literature, a powerful counter-narrative became apparent.  The key moment was reading Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, in which some forms of reading are described as an ‘invigorating’ form of ‘wholesome labour’.  Here was a way of imagining women readers as active, self-regulating individuals, whose practices were informed by an ethic of exertion rather than leisured indolence.  Suddenly, the stereotypical fears evoked by women readers became a secondary interest.

2) How did Imagining Women Readers develop and change as you transformed it from your PhD thesis into a monograph?

The biggest challenges went hand in hand: I needed to cut down the amount of material I had and to identify a clearer narrative.  In the thesis, I had allowed myself to explore some interesting but perhaps unnecessary tangents.  As a result, the argument was sometimes in danger of becoming obscured.  The book is more streamlined.  I also had to think more clearly about the date range I was working with.  The book stops at the end of the 1810s – a decade which is book-ended by the publication of the first and second editions of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s The British Novelists (in 1810 and 1820, respectively).  The intervening years also saw the publication of Jane Austen’s major novels.  For the book, I needed to think more clearly about how these works brought increasing respectability not only to novels, but to the women who enjoyed reading them.  I also wanted to demonstrate how this change in status was made possible by the earlier work of writers such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays.  It lent the book a coherence that the thesis was perhaps lacking.

3) The book focuses principally on three types of works: ‘conduct books, educational treatises and novels’. Did these different genres of literary work construct women readers in drastically different ways, or were there considerable crossovers between the three?

A lot of the writers I’m interested in worked across these different genres; Maria Edgeworth, May Hays, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West, and Mary Wollstonecraft all published novels alongside their non-fictional work.  Often, the novels seem to enact the content of the more obviously didactic works, giving writers the chance to show theory operating in practice.  Nevertheless, fiction frequently offers a testing ground for exploring ideas about reading. Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, for instance, is informed by the proto-feminist conviction that reading helps to cultivate one’s reason – but this is tempered by the lingering presence of older, regressive stereotypes about the pernicious effects of fiction.  Hays’s novel seeks to navigate a path between these extremes.  As this suggests, novels can offer a more expansive setting for negotiating debates about women’s reading; but at the same time, I didn’t want to lose sight of the richness of ‘non-literary’ texts.  I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the rhetorical strategies they employ when discussing the virtues of reading.  In conduct books, for instance, reading is frequently depicted as an act of work, or an investment, or as involving a form of economic management.  In that respect, it contributes to the construction of a more complex and outward-looking model of domestic femininity than we might expect from putatively ‘didactic’ writing.

4) What do you think were the main social and cultural issues at stake when authors sought to imagine and define the ways in which women read?

As critics like Jacqueline Pearson and Kate Flint have shown, the figure of the woman reader is often a conduit for expressing a range of social and cultural anxieties.  This is aided by those negative stereotypes of women as flawed, impressionable readers.  Consequently, discussions of women’s reading are often situated in relation to a range of other contexts: the fear of Revolutionary France; the debilitating effects of commerce and luxury; excessive sensibility; and the regulation of female sexuality, to name just a few.  But rather than focusing on how reading exacerbated these anxieties, I wanted to explore how it offered the means of combatting them.  I focused on how a variety of writers urged women to become discriminating – even resistant – readers, who cultivated their independent judgement and reason.  From this perspective, what’s really at stake is the way in which leisure, domesticity and work are defined in relation to reading.  As I mentioned above, reading becomes a form of virtuous, domestic labour that enables women to improve themselves and, by extension, the nation.  Similarly, in the book I write about how the concept of female leisure is redefined: rather than an unproductive state of indolence, it accommodates acts of reading that confer disinterested moral authority upon women.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am working on a book about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature, provisionally entitled Domesticating Wonder: Women Writing for Children, 1750-1830.  There are two key strands that I’m exploring.  The first is the evolving status of ‘wonder’ in writing for children.  I’m interested in how it is reconfigured from denoting that which is marvellous and fantastical to that which is produced by children’s informed, rational observation of the world in which they live.  Isolating this shift complicates the idea that ‘rationalist’ modes of education of the late eighteenth century expelled wonder from children’s literature.  It also leads to the second strand of the project, which re-evaluates the nature of domesticity in writing for children.  I’m interested in how rationalised, domesticated forms of wonder allow children to perceive the ways in which their daily lives are implicated within a range of economic, environmental, and ethical networks.  I want to suggest that this produces a kind of cosmopolitan global consciousness that originates in the home.  Pursuing this argument has led me to critical approaches that I’ve not really used before: I’ve found it helpful to draw upon theories of globalisation and eco-critical approaches to literature.  The latter has also led me to develop an increasing interest in animal studies.  I’m enjoying broadening my horizons and have managed to incorporate elements of this project into my teaching, in the form of a module on animals in children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present.

David Higgins is an Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leeds; he currently serves on the BARS Executive and was until recently the Editor of the BARS Bulletin & Review.  His doctoral research focused on the constructions of literary genius in late Romantic periodicals; this project formed the basis of his first monograph, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).  More recently, he has worked on diverse subjects including Romantic China, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ecocriticism and creativity (working as part of Leeds’ ongoing Creativity Project and acting as Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Creative Communities, 1750-1830’ network).  His major research project over the past few years has been an examination of the ways in which narratives of localised selfhood in English Romantic writing developed in relation to larger national and imperial formations.  This work has recently resulted in his latest monograph, Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780-1850, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in September and which we discuss below.

1) In your acknowledgements, you write that Romantic Englishness had its genesis in MA work you conducted in 1997.  How much of your thinking from this time survives in the book, and what major realisations have transformed your thinking about the topic in the intervening period?

I suppose that what survives is an interest in how micro-narratives of individual selfhood intersect with macro-narratives of nation and empire.  What I didn’t necessarily have in 1997 were the intellectual tools or knowledge of the period to make sense of this complex area.  I ended up working on a topic in which I was less interested for my doctoral thesis and first book, which may have saved me from making a total hash of this one…  I think that the main changes in my thinking have been a partial move away from psychobiography, which (unless done very carefully) always has the danger of reducing a complex text to an imagined intention or neurosis, and the development of an ecological concern with writing and place: particularly ideas of ‘the local’ and their implication in larger national and imperial formations.  This shift has been enabled, in part, by the more sophisticated ecocriticism that has emerged in the last decade or so.  My interest in the topic has also been given greater force and direction by recent political and cultural debates about the nature and value of ‘Englishness’.

2) What led you to make your primary focus ‘Romantic-period autobiography written within and about England’?

I’ve been interested in literary and philosophical constructions of selfhood since I was an undergraduate, and this interest was consolidated by an MA module that I took on ‘Romantic Autobiography’ (taught by Greg Dart).  When I came to think about a large project on national identity a few years later, I had already published articles that emerged from my postgraduate work and addressed this topic in autobiographical texts by William Hazlitt and Benjamin Robert Haydon.  Therefore, it seemed natural enough to use ‘autobiography’ as a limiting term that would make the project viable and consonant with my intellectual interests.  The focus on England emerged somewhat later, for two reasons.  First, I was well aware that a lot of important work had already been done on ‘external’ cultural encounter in Romantic travel writing and I wasn’t sure that I could add much to this.  In contrast, ‘internal’ cultural encounter seemed to me an important and under-explored area.  Secondly, I began to become particularly interested in specifically English representations as a response to the emergence of ‘Four Nations’ Romanticism and my sense that, as well as giving much-needed attention to Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Romanticism, this should also cause us to rethink our understanding of a specifically English Romanticism.

3) You contend in your introduction that ‘Englishness was a heterogeneous and unstable category in the Romantic period, and always inflected by alterity’ and point out that this has been occluded by the dominance of narratives which conflate English and British identities. What do you believe are the major perspectives we can gain by recovering a set of a specifically English Romantic-period identities?

I think that there are three answers to this.  Two relate to our understanding of the period, and the other relates to present-day concerns.  To begin with the contemporary situation, it’s clear that debates about the nature and value of Englishness have been given new impetus in recent years due to devolution, immigration, and so on.  Given the ever-present danger of taking a ‘purist’ and exclusionary attitude to Englishness, I think that it’s useful to consider its history, and particularly ways in which English identities have always been porous, complex, displaced, and overdetermined.  My first period-specific answer relates to my reply to Question 2.  Interest in ‘Four Nations Romanticism’ provides an opportunity to consider a specifically English Romantic tradition that might usefully be abstracted from a potentially statist and imperialistic notion of ‘English Literature’ that emerged in subsequent years.  Finally, I think that reflecting on the complex relationship between Englishness and place allows me to complicate the localism that has been so important to the idea of Romantic ecology.

4) Your book examines canonical Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare) and essayists (Hazlitt, Lamb and De Quincey), but also pays extensive attention to William Cowper, Samuel Bamford, Thomas Bewick and William Cobbett. How did you select this cast of writers as your principal subjects, and were there other authors you considered including?

The most obvious thing about that list of authors, of course, is that they are all white and male, although not all middle-class.  I had originally intended to write about a much larger and diverse range of texts, including slave narratives and poetry and memoirs by women.  At that stage, the study was conceived as a more general and far too ambitious account of autobiography and place in the period.  A lot of rich texts were lost when I decided to exclude foreign travel writing, including works by Byron, Letitia Landon, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft.  As my argument developed about the autobiographical construction of Englishness through representations of ‘the local’ within an imperial context, this further limited my selection of texts (although I still cover quite a lot of ground).  It’s not that female or black autobiography within England during the period is uninterested in national identity per se, but I did not generally find that these texts connected Englishness and the local.  It’s quite possible, of course, that I have missed some texts that would have worked.  In the end, I just had to go with my instincts about what was viable.  The person I most regret not including is Charlotte Smith, whom I decided to leave out quite late in the day.  Her poetry moves interestingly between local, national, and sometimes global geographies; however, I wasn’t confident enough that she was specifically concerned with Englishness rather than Britishness, or that I had room for another chapter.  Partly to assuage my anxiety about this decision, I intend to write about nation and catastrophe in her poetry as part of my next project.

5) What new projects do you plan to turn your attention to now that this one is complete?

I have a few other things to finish off, but my main focus is on developing a major project on representations of environmental catastrophe in Romantic and post-Romantic writing.  I imagine that this will keep me going for quite a few years.  The first step will be a short book entitled 1816: Empire, Climate Change, and British Romanticism, timed (I hope) to coincide with the bicentenary of the ‘Year Without A Summer’ in 2016.